Kate Williams

FIRE-UP FRIDAY

Tips and ideas to fire-up your class of poets!

Today’s tip:

Warm-Up Chat – and how to steer for poetry prep:

Warm up with a relaxed whole-class chat on the given topic of your poem. Perhaps don’t even mention the goal of poetry-writing until afterwards, by which time they’ll be fired up and enthused. Make sure everyone contributes, even if the shyest children just join in with shared sound effects or gestures, or in a class vote on a relevant viewpoint. That will ensure that everyone dips a toe in the water before launching into written input.

During your discussion, elicit expressive vocabulary and pause to invite imagery where you spot opportunities. Direct the focus in interesting ways, perhaps widening its span or homing in on the details of one aspect. Ask questions that will set minds thinking and dreaming.

Here’s a warm-up EXAMPLE chat with a given theme: Feelings, moods, emotions:

For this particular theme, set the ball rolling by confessing to a feeling you’ve experienced lately – it could simply be annoyance at some trifling matter or amusement at a funny cartoon, or perhaps something a little deeper, such as sorrow or delight about something in your life or in the news.

Ask who else has felt like that, with prompts as needed. Discuss physical reactions and do them together – biting nails or lip, frowning and smiling, tearing hair, leaping up and cheering, crying, kicking and screaming, hiding in embarrassment. Introduce simile and personification ideas along the way – ‘cheerful as the sunshine’, ‘angry as a stormy sea’, ‘purring’, ‘howling’, any more? Don’t let the mood get too dark or the focus too personal, and control the amount of input from any one child, for a flowing, colourful discussion. This is a preamble to creative writing, not a therapy session. Incidentally, if you judge the topic to be too sensitive for any children, bring in a teddy or soft toy animal and refer all feelings to that instead.

For a less personal topic, such as ‘space’, ‘under the sea’ or ‘spring time’, steer away from hard facts and towards elements beyond, like atmosphere, associations and ideas evoked.

End your chat on a high note or a funny  or exciting one, as appropriate, as you introduce your planned poem-writing activity. Offer a frame for this, with a starter line, try a few together, write up one on the board, stressing that it’s not for copying, and off they’ll go!

There’s sure to be someone who can’t get started even now, or thinks they can’t, and they may need a reminder of ideas discussed and a starter-word to set their pen rolling. Then you’ll find you can’t stop them!

Have fun! 

More next week.

Kate

Photos: top one from external source; other two from my school workshops.